Black Doves is the latest Netflix drama series to have us actually put down our phones and become glued to the screen for a solid six hours, but how does the series end?
The new thriller (and often comedic) series dropped on 5th December and stars Keira Knightly as Helen Webb, a Black Dove, aka a spy, who is married to the Secretary of State for Defence Wallace Webb, and has been sharing government secrets with her boss Reed (Sarah Lancashire) for years.
However, her world turns upside down when her secret lover Jason, a civil servant is killed. She goes on a mission, along with her old bestie and assassin Sam (Ben Whishaw) to discover the truth of what happened to Jason, but they soon find themselves uncovering a murder plot and global scandal that is far more complicated than they first anticipated.
So how does the series wrap up? Well it turns out there were two endings for the series. So here's who actually killed Jason and who the creators originally planned to be the killer.
What happened at the end of Black Doves?
After six episodes of espionage, shoot outs and many Christmas references, we finally found out the Chinese ambassador, was killed by Trent Clark after Helen uncovers the missing video footage in the jewellery shop where Maggie worked. Trent is the son of London crime boss Alex Clark and was in love with the Chinese ambassador's daughter Kai-Ming Chen.
He visited their flat to give her drugs because he thought this was the way to her heart, but accidentally ran into her dad who confronted him about the drugs. Trent pushed the ambassador and he hit his head against a marble table and died instantly.
As the son of a crime boss he had plenty of contacts to cover it up and so he calls his family who come and make the death look like a drug overdose. Stephen Yarrick is part of this cohort and tells the prime minster what is going on, which reveals to Helen some of the government are working in collaboration with the Clarks.
So who killed Jason? Well Helen and Williams head over to the Borough Market meeting point to handover the video footage in exchange for keeping Trent alive and securing the return of Sam, Kai-Ming and Eleanor.
But rather than Alex being responsible for killing Jason it was Trent. After realising that the murder had been caught on camera, Trent took it upon himself to hire a hitman aka Elmore Fitch (Paapa Essiedu) to kill the people who had found the tape. These were of course Maggie, who was one of Kai-Ming's friend who had started telling stories about her to the tabloids, before she was recruited to MI5 to keep tabs on Kai-Ming and the Chinese ambassador. After discovering the footage she told her newspaper contact Phillip and her MI5 colleague Jason, and they were planning to go public with the information. Trent had the three of them followed and then murdered.
Helen then also became a target as she was seen meeting up with Jason shortly after Maggie and Phillip departed the cafe and that's why Elmore Fitch turned up at her house.
Yep, it turns out Jason wasn't in fact just a civil servant, he was working undercover for MI5. Helen discovers this while speaking to Reed at a carol service, who reveals MI5 were worried about a government leak and so a number of agents went investigating. However, despite Helen confessing to Jason she was indeed a spy, he kept her secret and filed a report saying she was no cause for concern the day before he died.
The series ends with Sam getting a job offer from Hector Newman to join his crime family, after Sam killed all the big players in the Clark family and now has a target on his back. Meanwhile, somehow coming out unscathed, Reed tells Helen her next mission will see Wallace promoted to Prime Minister in the spring and she'll be moving into number 10.
What was Black Doves' alternative ending?
Ok so it turns out Trent Clark wasn't the original murderer of the Chinese ambassador. Instead it was meant to be MI5 agent Perryman who would kill the ambassador on Reed's instructions, after Trent knocked him over.
They had filmed these scenes, however, they ended up changing the added plot point as it felt too "convoluted".
The series creator Joe Barton told the Metro: "We just took that one extra layer out because it was a lot."
While Perryman might not have been involved this time around, could we see him return to cause more trouble in season two? We can't wait to find out.
Black Doves is available on Netflix now
